All laptops are garbage huh, that's a hot take.

The macbook and it's 3+ year butterfly keyboard debacle or windows 10 laptops with all of their spyware even when high end being his only 2 practical choices is what he is probably referring to.

Kindles are cheap and light, if digital reading is your goal.

I often read PDF versions of books (especially technical books) or PDFs of academic papers etc

I've never been able to view these properly on a kindle. Well, last time I tried anyway, is it better now?

A foldable phone would be great for PDFs. I often want to flip between pages quickly, which Kindles still can't do.

Sony DPT-RP1.

Kobo Aura One seems to be the right size for your use case.

Yep, I'm currently reading my EPUBs and PDFs on an ancient iPad 3. I researched a newer solution and settled on a Kobo Aura One (or perhaps the Forma which came out only recently) running the open-source KOReader [0], which is apparently much better than the built-in app on the Kobos. But I'm too cheap to upgrade while the iPad still works.

[0] http://koreader.rocks

I have an Aura One that I love (probably around 2k hours of use on it), but the PDF experience (of anything that can't be converted to epub anyway) is not good.

Kindles are not phones, the parent said "I want a phone that I can read books on, and spend quality time with..."

A foldable phone may meet his criteria, a Kindle would not.

Right ... the point is, I can do higher-quality reading without carrying extra devices around.

How do you access the kindle when you're not at home?

Based on the voting pattern at this point, I think several people may have misunderstood his last comment. He is the original person to post in support of a better phone based reading experience, not the Kindle advocate. So he prefers to carry one device, and uses his phone to read.

Yeah, I'll admit I didn't notice that. My apologies.

And it does‘t have any distractions on it. When I‘m reading on my phone I always get distracted by messages or googling something.

Most of my books are still physical books. It‘s weird but I often buy books based on their cover.

Apple's phones are now faster than their laptops. I think it makes sense to have a folding computer, especially now that we have screen tech that enables it.

*For very limited workloads - And those synthetic geekbench scores don't really count

Try JS Octane benchmarks then. Or how do YOU benchmark devices?

The real bottleneck is UI, not CPU's.

It isn't so much about the benchmark one uses. A CPU converts electricity to heat, and does computation as a side-effect. A CPU embedded in a laptop (or moreover, a desktop) is going to be able to convert more electricity into more heat — and more computation — by virtue of being able to better dissipate the heat due to having a larger surface area to do it over. (In addition to having active cooling — vents and fans — which I've yet to see on a phone.)

Modern non-phone CPUs can have TDPs of more than 80W. If your phone did 80W, it would burn your hand. So, forgive me if I'm skeptical of any benchmark that says a phone outperforms a laptop.

You're arguing that the phone CPU can get significantly better performance, do so with less power, and occupy a form factor smaller than what a laptop requires? Why would I not just manufacture a less space-constrained version of this chip (to make it cheaper) and stick it in a laptop?

I Googled the specific benchmark you referenced. I'm not able to find results on it, but one of the top hits was this: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/googl...

Why do you think Apple is bringing iOS apps to Mac? ARM MacBook is inevitable (unless they switch to AMD).

That's likely a 35W CPU and I'd bet it won't even be close in performance to current laptop standard i5 or Ryzen. Maybe it can keep up with the ULV versions. ARM is good at power saving, not performance.

*For very limited workloads

> Apple's phones are now faster than their laptops.

Kind of like how a plane is faster than a car. You're trading off some flexibility for that added speed.